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concealment sends this quote from an article at ReadWriteWeb:
"Tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is fed up with Facebook and will take his business elsewhere. He's sick of getting hit with huge fees to send messages to his team's fans and followers. Two weeks ago Cuban tweeted out a screen grab of an offer he'd received from Facebook. The social network wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million people. Along with the screen grab, Cuban wrote, 'FB is blowing it? This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site.'"

And effective too with marketing. $3,000 might seem expensive for us but if you have million fans and make hundreds of millions then the fee is a drop in the bucket that will generate far more revenue than spamming people for tickets and events.

Compared to most other forms of Mass Marketing this is a rather fair deal.Say you get 1% to respond of one million that is 10,000. If your product has $0.30 in profit then you break even. But who has $0.30 in profit, For a cheap product you usually get at least a few bucks out of it. So you pay for you Marking Cost. You could try the competitors and you may get a smaller rate, however you will not reach as many people.

Compared to most other forms of Mass Marketing this is a rather fair deal.

Right; but it shouldn't be compared to "other forms of Mass Marketing" for several reasons.

because this was a free service, which was marketed as a free service and then changed

because in this case we are talking about people who voluntarily chose to connect to a company to get all it's messages

because this direct connectivity as in Google+, Facebook and so on is something completely new and different from tradional messaging

The first; that this is a bait and switch operation, is for me the most important. However even though I feel some sympathy for these people, they fundamentally brought it on themselves and this is a situation where it's the people's responsibility to do something different next time. Never lock yourself in to a computing product controlled by one vendor without a written guarantee of indefinite access to good terms written by a lawyer you can trust. This is something most people knew in the pre-Windows era.

Compare the diference between what happened when the Gnome Foundation went rogue with the same situation from Microsoft. Gnome replaced Gnome 2 with a completely different Gnome 3 interface which doesn't fit old users needs. Microsoft is replacing Windows with Metro + a backwards compatibility interface which also doesn't fit user's needs. Because the Gnome users have the source code and multiple suppliers, XFCE, Cinnamon and Unity have sprung up as interfaces designed to cater to the needs of users that Gnome 3 doesn't fit for. By the time people are forced to switch they will have a choice which is right for them. Microsoft is going to force people who are locked into Windows to accept whatever Microsoft wants them to accept. Only those people that can switch to OS/X or Linux will be able to escape.

To achieve the same in social networking, even people who use Facebook need to concentrate on using other solutions wherever they can provide equivalent functionality. Otherwise we all end up locked in.

No it's not. A bait-and-switch is advertising a product for some price and then when a customer comes you tell them the product is not available and you attempt to sell them something else. Changing a free service to being partially paid-for is not a bait-and-switch.

This is precisely a bait and switch. You promise a free service, refuse to offer the free service and then demand money for the exact same functionality that was promised for free.

Combine this with recent accusations that Facebook's feeds have been broken on purpose as of late to necessitate promoting posts, and accusations of click-fraud eating up paid advertising and you have to wonder if Facebook is beginning to shoot themselves in the foot. They have tons of users, but they don't seem to know how to monetize that well.

I have a FB business account and a page with 1800 fans. I can reach them just fine and pay nothing. Now, facebook also offers me that, if i pay, I can reach more people (non-fans). I did it - it worked. I don't do it anymore because I'm, let's say, "restructuring" my business. But I'll do it again sometime.

FWIW: I'm bidding up to 3 cents per click, but on average I pay 1 cent per click.

Do you really reach all 1,800 fans with your post? Have you looked at your actual reach counts? We have dozens of FB pages here with millions of followers. At the beginning of this year, our posts reached an average of 24% of our followers. After F8, it dropped to 16%. As of last month, our posts reach 4% of our audience. All due to the way Facebook has changed their EdgeRank algorithm. If we want our posts to reach more of our audience, we have to pay.

Just stop. You have no idea what you are talking about. Facebook users can post and their posts will get to everyone who has not muted them. I can still send things to my mom, my cat and my college roommate. My cat thinks I am annoying though, so odds are that twat will not see what I have to post.

What has changed is people who have "Fan" pages. Those people who are using Facebook to promote themselves now have to pay to reach ALL of their fans. I do not have a fan page, but my

Facebook users can post and their posts will get to everyone who has not muted them

False. Facebook filters individual pages too. If you make a post, only about 15-20% of your friends will see it on their News Feed if they have their settings for you set at the default (How many updates? "Most Updates"). For friends that have you set to the most visible setting ("All Updates"), you will still only reach about 50-75% of those people.

Now, FB tends to be pretty good about knowing which 50-75% of your friends are most likely to notice that they're missing your posts (the people who are labeled as 'family', those who most often show up in photos with you, and those who are all more active are MUCH more likely to find themselves in the % that SEE your post). But they are NOT transparently passing your message along to all of your friends. And you are not necessarily seeing 100% of the posts that your friends make, even if you have your settings made for "All Updates" for a specific friend.

If you (as an individual personal-account user) want to get any message out on FB to 100% of the people who follow you, you now have to pay for it. If you do not promote a post, it will reach approximately 15-20% of your friends who have you set to the default (How many updates? "Most Updates"; What types of Updates? "all are checked"), and about 50-75% of your friends who have you set to the max (How many updates? "all updates").

If you are a business page or other 'professional' account, any non-promoted post will reach 15-20% of your followers/likers/subscribers. Only if you PAY to PROMOTE your post will it reach the News Feed of 100% of your followers.

This from a friend who does a TON of work with Facebook's API and has made several requests for documentation directly from the powers-that-be at Facebook. So my source is secondhand, but he's getting it direct from the horse's mouth and I trust him--especially because this change is directly harmful to his business and he's pissed about it.

Bait and switch is not concerned with contracts. If I own a `tobacco' shop, and I advertise in Stoner Weekly a 99% off sale on bongs, then when customers start showing up, charge them full price, I am committing fraud. Does Facebook advertise itself as free, then charge you? That would be bait and switch. Climb down from your ivory tower and recognize that people live in a real world and your purely academic distinctions are meaningless (and wrong).

Everyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that the cost is pretty reasonable

This Facebook fan page shit is basically just RSS. You know what it costs to serve an RSS feed update? Next to nothing.

The trick is to get a million people to sign up to the RSS feed.

And that is sort of the 'bait and switch' situation. Facebook had what are essentially 'facebook-RSS' feeds, that other facebook users could 'subscribe to'. And it was free.

So companies spent millions of hours and dollars promoting the shit out of them to get a million subscribers... and then they have the carpet yanked out from under them -- now the feeds cost thousands to update -- at least if you want any sort of reliability that users will get the update.

They'd have perhaps been better off spending all that effort promoting actual RSS feeds all along, and then when they'd accumulated a million users facebook wouldn't be able to step in and insert a toll booth.

Too bad they got all caught up in the facebook hype. To paraphrase you 'anyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that building a business venture on top of a social network platform gives away power to the social network platform, and really... all they REALLY provide is a cheesy proprietary hosted CMS.

All he has to do is convince a million of his fans to leave Facebook and setup their own pod.

Pretty much.

Technically speaking, you are right, they just provide RSS feeds. A billion or so of them, filtered and correlated and available 24x7. With unlimited photo storage, the ability to update the feeds from a smartphone in an app so easy to use that everyone from a 2 year old kid to an 80+ year old grand parent can use.

The problem isn't SAAS per se, its the lock in to the facebook platform. If I shell out for a hosted Joomla or Drupal or whatever flavor of the day CMS you like... Diaspora even. That can be outsourced SAAS, and I could have 5 9's uptime and effectively unlimited photo storage, and enough bandwidth to serve millions for pretty close to chump change.

But I'd be in shock if the host one day decided to charge me $3000 to post an update to the site's RSS feed.... The thing is, such a think already exists. www.nba.com Obviously that site did not have the market penetration that the Mavericks needed. If it did, they would have been better off convincing people to visit www.nba.com/mavericks, instead of Liking a FB page.

Exactly, this BLEW my mind, when I started seeing major enterprises who ALREADY had web functional presences sending their users off to facebook/what-am-i-thinking

They should have had the spigot turned the other way, let users find them on facebook, like the on facebook, whatever, but have all that as a launchpad to www.my-own-bloody-site.com.

Facebook owns the market segment called Facebook.

And this is only valuable because enterprises fell over themselves to get onto it. They handed over the power to connect with users to be cool, or something.

Half the people I know with facebook accounts only created them precisely to enter a contest, or leave a comment, or some other nonsense on a site that should have hosted it themselves.

As an enterprise, you absolutely want to be able to connect with facebook users, and go after that segment, but the last thing you should be doing is driving users into facebook, and becoming dependent on it.

That is simply too stupid for words; and yet its exactly where a lot of companies are right now.

You can't be "friends" with "Pages" (that is, companies) on Facebook. All you can to is "like" them. This means that some of their updates will appear in your feeds. Which is determined algorithmically. Your posts don't automatically show up in your friends feeds either; that's determined by the same algorithm. If you want to guarantee they get something, send them a message.

All this complaining is from companies who want to be able to guarantee that when they push some inane crap out there, that it appears

Recently even the Kernel developers got caught into this mess, having Linus calling some maintainer of UDEV a lier.Google UDEV and systemd to see the whole gory mess, and mind my words, this is only the beginning of the troubles in GNU/Linux land.

People disagree with each other and call each other names on the internet, wow what an eye-opener.

If you think this is bad you might want to look back a few years on lkml, or any other major open source project. Given the ego's and the ability to instantly spout a

Except it wasn't a product, it was just a random post to the Mavericks page. Facebook basically wanted to charge him $3000 to bypass their "spam filter" so it went to the top of everyone's news feed.

They claim they "It's Not A Shakedown - We're Trying To Fight Spam" but SPAM is unsolicited junk email. When you specifically choose to follow a page you are signing up for whatever posts they make to the page. And what's even worse is Facebook provides a way for someone to choose what types of posts they see in this case, *unless* Facebook gets paid in which case they are explicitly encouraging the spam...

But hey, it's their service and it's free and ad supported. They have a right to do things like this to make money, and if you don't like it the appropriate response is to stop using the service, as Cuban has done. That and bitch about their hypocrisy and apparent redefinition of "spam", which is more satisfying but usually less productive (unless you are a billionaire who influences purchasing decisions for dozens of companies... in which case bitching is both satisfying AND productive!)

.3 cents per person is really pretty cheap. Somehow telemarketers stay in business, and they're paying someone $8/hr to make what 20 calls an hour? If it's not worth.3 cents per person to contact them, you probably have no actual business contacting them at all.

It makes you think twice about sending that "lulz! hug U! luv Marky" message you feel the urge to share with the world. A million of interested leads(they actually opted in with the semi-soundness of mind that's required for Facebook) has got to be worth something.

Remind me: I've heard the name before but what is he supposed to be selling? I'm too lazy to look him up on Wikipedia. I've lost track of dotcom millionaires.

Really? I am not overly impressed with the quality of messages I get from the people who are paying for the privilege, on any medium or platform. That sort of content is called "advertising", and it sucks anytime.

It's not bad that FB wants to charge a wealthy commercial party to reach millions of customers, but it is bad that they broke the notification system itself in the process... Nonprofits or even people who happen to have a lot of followers also have to pay up, or their posts won't reach all of their followers. And if you follow someone, you might not get to see all of their updatess either unless they pay up.

Is it? If you read the actual article, Cuban's complaints seem to be that there are extra costs not included in that figure. Part of his problem is that they had to advertise for Facebook to drive people to their Facebook page in the first place. So there's already money invested which should be taken into consideration as part of the "cost per person."

He also points out that since it's variable and on a per-post basis, it's basically impossible for them to plan ahead - they can't say "OK, we're dedicating $100,000 this year to our Facebook budget" and then choose when and what to post based on that, as the price per post can change. He also seems to suggest that this actually increases the costs, as it adds a new layer of accounting for every post.

I find that second argument to be the most persuasive. If the cost per post really does change and budgeting really is impossible, then yes, that's definitely a problem and one that Facebook should fix. He seems to be OK with the idea of paying Facebook, but he wants the costs to be known ahead of time and paid up front, rather than on a per-post basis.

Cuban also appears to be betting that, since they have to advertise to get people to the Facebook page in the first place, he can advertise their Twitter feed and get people to follow that, instead. That way their upfront costs would remain the same, but they wouldn't have extra unexpected and unknowable costs in the future. I'm not sure I entirely believe this, but if he's right and it's their advertising that's driving people to their Facebook page and not Facebook as a platform itself, then why should he pay Facebook extra for the privilege of needing to advertise for them in the first place?

Of course, I suppose we'll only find out if he's right in a year or two, after he tries out moving to other platforms. I'm not so sure he is, but then again, I never "liked" any businesses on Facebook in the first place.

These are people who have already opted in to receive messages from you. A fair comparison is people who have subscribed to your mailing list, RSS feed, or whatever. If it's costing you three cents per subscriber to your mailing list, then you're probably doing something wrong.

While I have no pity for Mr. Cuban(Oh, sure, facebook is just going to suck up the hosting bills for your web page and messaging system forever, for free...), this may well signal that Facebook has an actual problem...

If somebody who is, and has, actually run businesses and made money, and so forth, and is facebooking for commercial purposes is willing to throw a little tantrum in public about the price, this suggests that they don't think that facebook is worth what it is charging(or they do; but are willing to piss off a valuable communications channel over $3k). That would be bad for facebook. If you are an advertising vendor(which they are attempting to be, in this case) and a potential account laughs in your face, walks out, and then publishes an open letter mocking your offer as insultingly expensive, that isn't a good sign.

People whining about having to pay for things is largely irrelevant. People who are accustomed to paying for things refusing to pay for your product? That should make you nervous. Facebook has proven that people will flock to them at the $0 price point; but they have yet to do much testing of the demand curve at higher costs. If it turns out to be extremely elastic...

Well if companies stop using them then FB will respond by lowering their prices. That is capitalism 101. Advertising and marketing aint cheap.

I do respect Mr. Cuban. I watch him on sharktank and out of all the clueless MBA morons, he knows his stuff and is intelligent and very hard working to make sure his clients are happy and performing well.

It is true I read Ford was paying $1 million for advertising on FB with full page ads. That is crazy, but if you think about it more eyeballs look at FB than TV without DVRs in 2012. If that $3000 per tweets for a game represents just a 10% increase in sales that can pay for itself easily!

It's starting to turn me off. Somewhere in the scheme of things it decided that I was a smart and wealthy individual and must want the new Samsung S3. There is a massive banner ad on my facebook page and all over the android app.

No. I don't care about the fucking S3. Move on. Now it's starting to show me that my 'acquaintances'' liked Walmart or Levi. Wouldn't I like to like them too?

No. Sweet Jesus. It's turning me off where I'm ready to move my stuff. Problem is I'm an amateur photographer. I have close t

This is true. I've worked in advertising and $3000 ain't bad. Sounds like a temper-tantrum to me.

"The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site."

That's like going from primetime TV to midnight re-runs.

Hasn't baseball moved to midnight reruns by now? Also there is a new MySpace? What happened to the old one? I suddenly feel really out of touch with stuff that really doesn't interest me. I shall put an appointment in my next weeks calendar and agonize a full second over his woe, grief and doom.That poor, poor man who's relevance had eluded me at the moment I hit the submit button. Also: Rich guy billed by FB. News at 11.

You may not be taking into account that each company will send at least one posting a day but most of them are just basic updates to keep the company name fresh in their heads. If (in this example) you have 1M followers and you send just one update per day $3000x30 = $90,000/month or $1,095,000 a year just to send one message a day to people who have already shown interest in what ever you happen to be babbling about. So compare this to Twitter where I can send verbal diarrhea all day long for next to nothing and we now have a supply/demand curve. So while overall you're spending roughly $1/follower/year(for only one post/day) when you compare it to twitter you start to see that you can engage your fan base (not necessarily your customer base) in a much more responsive manner. You can try out different tactics and see what fits. If you blab too much people will stop listening (not following) you, if you get it right you will attract more attention and followers.

So as the rhetoric goes the market will work its self out as we see today with Cubans $0.02.

Apologies for replying to my own post, but I think I may have been a little *too* cryptic.

What I mean is that we all know Twitter can't keep on keepin' on as they have been. Limiting the extent of a user's tweets to some determined-by-proprietary-algorithm subset of followers would be the first step. The second step would be a fee to make sure a tweet reaches x number of users. The more followers a user/brand has, the more money to reach that brand's followers.

He has no quarems with his $60 million private plane that generates no ROI.

A private plane doesn't have to generate revenue.Commercial or private, air travel costs time and money.If you can reduce travel time and turn it into working time, that can be enough to tip the cost:benefit ratio in favor of a private plane./.ers make the exact same argument about IT every day:It costs money, but it makes everyone more efficient, which generates revenue, which justifies the expense of IT.

Facebook constantly tinkers with EdgeRank to make it more effective, says product manager Will Cathcart. The algorithm change in September was a bigger change than usual, Cathcart says, but its goal was simply to cut down on spam in people's news feed.

FB: "Unless you pay for delivery, we'll be fighting your spam".

End result:* the "network socialite" doesn't actually "socialize" anymore - it's advertising* the others will still be served spam

Of course, I find it amusing that FB is more than willing to inject ads into people's FB page... so I can only assume those people are paying.

They're also likely getting met with "WTF is this crap doing on my Facebook page".

I'm kind of hoping Facebook really starts to piss off people and we see an end to this whole social media craze where everybody wants everything to work like Facebook. Even stuff internal to companies is moving in that direction, and it isn't as useful as the people pushing for it like

Facebook doesn't inject ads into YOUR facebook page.
The newsfeed is not YOUR page, the PROFILE page is and they are not adding ads to that.
The newsfeed is just what it sais, a list of "news" from the sources you chose, kinda like choosing a tv channel and watching their news. Where they inject ads into your... time spent there.

The newsfeed is just what it sais, a list of "news" from the sources you chose

Except they've started injecting ads into the middle of the news feed from sources I didn't choose. Not in the side bar, but in the stream.. listed as "Sponsored" with a prominent "Like this page" button.

But, that's OK... my experiment is deciding for myself if Facebook sucked or not is almost complete, and I'm coming down on the side of Facebook Sucks.

I don't understand why companies and individuals with a "brand" are so willing to put that brand behind Facebook's. E.g. webcomic artists who say, "see this Facebook exclusive comic", or companies that have Facebook exclusive deals. They should be using Facebook to drive people towards their primary site, not use their primary site to drive people towards a third party who doesn't really care about them, and that may disappear within the year (or whenever a new website comes up).

So all these brands that are on Facebook and not pushing people off Facebook are doing it wrong.

No one really wants to browse a corporate site unless they are applying for jobs.

I think $3,000 is a great deal for NBA fans who are looking for Maverick tickets. Same is true with selling custom merchandise. People like to read things that interest in them in their facebook unlike common disruptive advertising we do not give a shit about. If we didn't care we would not have liked it etc.

The facebook likes increase means you can market to a greater audience. If you people just went to your regular website t

Take comics. I'm visiting websites for these comics every day (or whenever I think a new comic is up, normally when notified by RSS). The best place for me to be notified about a new series, or hell, anything is on the website (linked to from the RSS feed). Hell, do what some of the artists do and just have a "comic" (in the same place as the regular comics) with text describing whatever it is. But want me to like you on Facebook so I can see an exclusive series? Not happening! Multiple reasons, including t

Facebook is a great 'buzz' generating tool... especially if you are willing to put some money into it.

Yes, drive the traffic to your site as many Corps do (a good example is 7-11 or Subway)... they offer contests and post them on their facebook pages and market the hell out of it (not just on facebook), in order to:1) gather your information (through the contest signup) in the event Facebook does fall off the face of the planet and market research and2) keep their brand on your mind

I think he's confused over the dynamics at work here. The fans aren't on Facebook because the Mavericks are there, the Mavericks are there because that's where the fans are. Moving to another service isn't really an option.

So Mr. Cuban thinks that if he goes to myspace his fan base will follow? Somehow I doubt it.

I'm not a member of anyone's fan base. However if I were, I would easily open a free account with yet another social network to keep track of what's happening with my precious.

This would be doubly so if the orders to switch come direct from my Gods (such as the people who I am a fan of.) Besides, what fans are pressed for time and cannot be bothered to register at a web site?

Forgive me if I'm incorrect here... But Facebook isn't trying to charge him to post on his page with 1 million fans; Facebook is trying to charge him for "promoting" [read: advertising] his post more prominently in peoples timelines and around the site.
I don't have a problem with this. You let Facebook's news feed dynamic work for free just like everyone else, your you pay up to reach others. Why is he pitching such a hissy fit over advertising not being free?

Forgive me if I'm incorrect here... But Facebook isn't trying to charge him to post on his page with 1 million fans; Facebook is trying to charge him for "promoting" [read: advertising] his post more prominently in peoples timelines and around the site.

I don't have a problem with this. You let Facebook's news feed dynamic work for free just like everyone else, your you pay up to reach others. Why is he pitching such a hissy fit over advertising not being free?

Facebook are now charging you to get access to your own fans per post, this is not extra advertising. Whenever you post something on facebook only a small subset will get your content injected into their news feed unless you cough up the extra money so that more/all of them see it.

This is something they only added a few months ago. They want to charge this every time you post as well.

So I don't blame him for getting a bit upset at least here as this is something that facebook have taken away e.g. it was

Are you sure you don't mean that facebook will ask for money so that your post stays longer and higher on people's newsfeed?
So now my posts won't reach all my 150 friends you're saying? Is this documented somewhere?

Are you sure you don't mean that facebook will ask for money so that your post stays longer and higher on people's newsfeed?So now my posts won't reach all my 150 friends you're saying? Is this documented somewhere?

This applies to pages e.g. fan pages that you have Liked and followed. When someone posts something to a fan page, everyone who is following that page does not automatically get the content in their newsfeed. You can see this if you have a page as it shows you the coverage. Facebook give you an option to "pay for more coverage" e.g. let more people already following you see your content.

For your own posts to your friends I am not sure about that. I believe they might all get it. Not 100% sure.

I always thought that the Get More Coverage option meant that people that have NOT subscribed to my page will get my post, as an ADVERTISEMENT, based on some algorithm where at least they target people with that interest (as my page).

EdgeRank, really? To determine what posts reach which users?
So you change 2 letters and you're trying to position yourself as a tech company that uses algorithms to better serve your users?

On the other hand either Cuban is overreacting or I'm missing something.
Facebook didn't "asked" for $3000 so that he can message 1mil friends. Facebook proposed that he paid $3000 so that his posts can sit higher on people's newsfeeds, for longer and maybe for people not even on his list. He could have said no and j

It's more than just the newsfeed. I have the newsfeed disabled by browser plugins and always keep my main page sorted by "most recent" but I still don't get all posts from some people/pages that I like. I check several of their walls directly because I genuinely don't want to miss anything they post.

I do not "like" anything or anyone if I don't want to see everything they post and facebook has royally pissed me off because they think they get to decide what I really like.

George Takei has made similar posts. Facebook wants to charge him for the amusing lolcats and whatever else he posts. When he posts about his book? Yeah, then it makes sense to charge him, but for the other stuff? Not so much.

His current solution was to tell everyone to add his page to their "interests" and then you start seeing his posts in your news-feed again.

The problem with advertising is, there's just too much. The more there is, the less value it has. To illustrate, what do you think had more advertising impact. . . back when television shows were sponsored by one sponsor, and you heard three ads per hour, all for the same sponsor, or nowadays when there's a five minute commercial break and you go to the bathroom or the kitchen, or browse facebook, and ignore the ads?

Similarly with online advertising, there's so much of it, none of it makes hardly any impres

...is that we will no longer push for fans or viewers because most of them can't afford to watch. Why would we invest in extending our fanbase if we have to lower ticket prices or get rid of exclusive broadcasts? That's crazy."

The "why not" is simple: Because they aren't posting this information as advertising. They are trying to keep their users informed (you know, users who actively sought out such information by "Like"ing the Mavs FB page in the first place) and FB is trying to force them to pay for reaching all of those folks that wanted the information. If they don't pay, only a small percentage will see the post by default (while the rest will just have to navigate to the FB page in question) despite the fact that all of the users wanted to see it.

Although his suggestion of a, "pay this default price and everyone sees it," implies that he's willing to play the money game if FB could get their act together. So expense isn't really his issue in the first place, just the actual model.

Back in the day, my band just got its own site. We gave away crap quality mp3's of our stuff, posted our gig schedules, and told people that if they wanted the good quality, they needed to send us money. We didn't "push" spam out to people, though that's also trivial with your email account and a simple list. Gheesh, it's not like it's all that expensive to just have your own site, and if they are fans, they probably prefer to visit when *they* feel like it, rather than get "spam announcements/ads" from